Harry Smiths's Anthology of American Folk Music

I don't really know what American Pop is, but you could just dive into the Yazoo & County records catalogs for some of the finest stuff available imo.

Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music, Volume IV
American Primitive Vol 2
The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of
Good For What Ails You: Music of the Medicine Shows

I wish I was a mole in the ground

that music of the medicine shows comp is great--"I heard the voice of a porkchop"!

Snrub, after American Pop (A.A.P. = you life will never be the same again), I started exploring the artists that really made the deepest impression. But here are some other suggestions:

Pop Music: The Early Years 1890-1950 is definitely your next stop because it's wall-to-wall American Pop unlike American Pop.

The Golden Age of Entertainment - Reader's Digest box on vinyl. Not sure if it's on CD but it's findable at thrift stores for cheap. Lotsa cheesy Hollywood tunes.

Make your peace with Broadway and explore one of the Great American Songbook dudes. I dig I Got Rhythm: The Smithsonian George Gershwin Collection. In general, stick with cheesy, old, and Hollywood when it comes to the GAS dudes.

I have some Frémeaux & Associés twofers that you'd dig like From Cake-Walk To Ragtime and, esp. Rock N' Roll 1927-1938 with The Boswell Sisters gulping title track and Louis Armstrong's proto-punk "Swing That Music" particular standouts.

Anything on Archeophone, esp. from the great, biopic-ready Bert Williams.

You Ain't Talkin' to Me: Charlie Poole and the Roots of Country Music

White Country Blues, 1926-1938: A Lighter Shade Of Blue

I love the Art Deco series, esp. the Fred Astaire, Eddie Cantor, and Al Jolson ones.

And pick up a copy of the three-DVD box of The Jazz Singer (do this first, actually).

And see Palmy Days starring Eddie Cantor if you can.

I started exploring the artists that really made the deepest impression.

Actually, that didn't turn out to be so fruitful, e.g. James Reese Europe (Reid Badger's biography is fantastic, though, Geechie Wiley, Alec Wilder (ugh, that GAS book of his is the PITS!!), etc. Which only serves the further augment the genius of American Pop.

I began before Christmas an attempt at getting ILXors to cover songs from the Anthology in whatever manner they chose. I got a few submissions, but would love it if we could really work that out. So please do it, send me an mp3 of yourself singing.

― ian, Friday, January 2, 2009 3:22 PM

sent you a buell kazee cover iirc

can't believe more ppl didn't take you up on this awesome offer tbh

Oh and I'm waaay down to trade American Pop for That Devilin' Tune.

yeah, i think i only got two songs! maybe i should try again.

i will do one. i'll have to recruit some friends and get drunk, but it would be a good time.

deserves its own thread imo

yes plz

some great reccs. let me also throw out:
http://www.amazon.com/Jewface-Various-Artists/dp/B000J3Q0Y8

Some other good stuff:
http://www.amazon.com/Afro-American-Spirituals-Work-Songs-Ballads/dp/B00000DC6N
http://www.amazon.com/Awake-My-Soul-Two-Disc-Special/dp/B0012IU2FW

don't forget about alan lomax's "sounds of the south" box. not only did moby not kill it, but shirley collins assisted in the recording! (read "america over the water" for some interesting if somewhat unrevealing anecdotes about this time)

i would do a cover of one of these songs!

I like the CD of Bascom Lamar Lunsford's that they put out on Folkways, "Ballads, Banjo Tunes And Sacred Songs Of Western North Carolina." Mermaid Song is one of my favorite songs.

^^^

yes! bascom was a one-of-a-kind dude. like, i got the feeling he's the guy harry smith wanted to be, but he was too late and too far removed.

Oh yeah how could I forget Jewface??? Totally classic comp as is Mocean Worker's amaaaaaaaaaazing house (or 'Jewtronica') remix of Ada Jones' "Under The Matzos Tree."

Sounds of the South boxset is amazing!

has anybody seen this site: http://www.folkstreams.net/pub/FilmsByTitle.php kind of gave me more of a visual perspective on some of this stuff

I began before Christmas an attempt at getting ILXors to cover songs from the Anthology in whatever manner they chose. I got a few submissions, but would love it if we could really work that out. So please do it, send me an mp3 of yourself singing.

― ian

Deserves its own thread. Did I send you mine? (Don't worry, it's better than the wire cover was)

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_4Kb-h3o7c9I/Sc1AVUjbWsI/AAAAAAAAAIU/daoE-eqV62c/s400/White+Spirituals2.jpg
http://homepage2.nifty.com/zzz-blues/lp-va-new/va-new115.jpg

http://www.austinchronicle.com/binary/200b/music_phases3.jpg

http://www.oldhatrecords.com/images/MtnBalladsLP.jpg

<IMG SRC=http://www.countrymusichalloffame.org/assets/Uploads/Creations-from-the-Collection/CMF-Records/Bristol-Sessionslrg.jpg>;

http://www.countrymusichalloffame.org/assets/Uploads/Creations-from-the-Collection/CMF-Records/Bristol-Sessionslrg.jpg

http://www.wirz.de/music/rbf/grafik/064.jpg

Some gorgeous, haunting stuff (and novelty tunes of varying mileage) on this compilation:
http://www.amazon.com/Classic-Ragtime-Offshoots-Various-Artists/dp/B000007QGR/

dem white folks in that top picture up dere is in a church not a field!

is sounds of south lp tracks the same as the cd series? i think there is some stuff on those thats on the anthology as well iirc..

jug one is a favourite - my flatmate had once and i tried unsuccessfully to lift it. it's great party music too!

i thought the anthology was made entirely of commercial recordings, the lomax recordings being a separate entity altogether.

maybe its just that moby track fucking with my brain... will pull lp and have a look later... i get confused kinda easily with alot of these comps

i thought the anthology was made entirely of commercial recordings, the lomax recordings being a separate entity altogether.
this is correct -- lomax released field recordings of people singing on their porches etc. shirley assisted!

(hey, who's "if you can believe your eyes and ears"? ya sent me a webmail about american pop, but i can't seem to find you here to reply back ... )

Do any of you know anything about this album?

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51elAE0O-nL._SL500_AA280_.jpg

I found it while hunting down Clarence Ashley / Gwen Foster songs I don't have and it looks really really cool.

Also, I started looking for any collections thematically arranged around prohibition. This is the only thing I could find tho,

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/519YY8NMF6L._SL500_AA300_.jpg

And tbh, the tracklist for that is kinda weak. I mean, great songs, but I was hoping for something more than a bunch of Duke Ellington + Louis Armstrong songs I've already heard. Do any of you know anything that's kinda thematically like this but better? (There was this great New Yorker piece a few years ago about Jake Walk + the Blues: http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2003/09/15/030915fa_fact_baum)

The known jake leg songs: http://www.ibiblio.org/moonshine/drink/jakesongs.html

I wish this was available as a compilation somewhere.

Have we talked about making an early American music thread yet?

xxpost The New Lost City Ramblers did an album of prohibition & moonshine songs. Not quite real old-time, but old-timey enough.

I began before Christmas an attempt at getting ILXors to cover songs from the Anthology in whatever manner they chose. I got a few submissions, but would love it if we could really work that out. So please do it, send me an mp3 of yourself singing.

― ian

I didn't see this one...

I have that People Take Warning set, and it's... ok.
The tracks are mostly on topical subjects, commentaries on recent news events and suchlike - they were cash-in discs at the time so weren't generally amazing examples of music even when new. I haven't spent loads of time with the set, so there may be some gems in there for all I know, but what I've heard has mostly been underwhelming. The selections are more of historical and cultural interest rather than musical for the most part.

I don't think the Goodbye Babylon set has been mentioned, but man alive, there's some astounding music in that collection, and the packaging is beautiful.

hey, who's "if you can believe your eyes and ears"? ya sent me a webmail about american pop, but i can't seem to find you here to reply back ... )
hey - tachikawa66atyahoodotyaddayadda

ah, sweet - will email you shortly.
and yeah, people take warning is super interesting but there is some really BAD stuff on it. i liked listening to it, but it's not as strong musically as a lot of the sets mentioned in this thread.

IIRC even the sleeve notes of that People Take Warning are vaguely apologetic about the quality.

yeah i don't think they were making any grand claims for a lot of it -- some of it is pretty horrifying how it exploits tragedy with the most mawkish, manipulative drivel.

Snrub, after American Pop (A.A.P. = you life will never be the same again),

You ain't a-kiddin'.

That's What I Call Sweet Music: Not really sure this belongs in the thread, but this is a collection of "dance orchestras" of the 1920s. Sort of the opposite of what was going on in pop music at the time to the Anthology. This is music made purely to have a good time, tales of falling in love at 11:30 on a Saturday night and being "as happy as I can be 'cause the one that I love loves me." The 1920s wasn't all hard times in the country, y'know.

The Other Anthology of American Folk Music: Compiled by some fan on the Internet, this is four more discs of rural American folk music from about the same era. The liner notes convey the brilliance of this collection far better than I ever could: "On this collection, there is 1 train wreck, 1 sinking ship, a lot of folks leaving if they ain't already gone, 8 murder victims, 4 dead mothers, 1 dead father, 1 dead steel driver, 6 dying men, 4 premonitions of death, fortunately plenty saved souls, 9 gamblers and 6 drunks that we know of, 2 coke addicts, 6 cheaters, a lot of shots fired, 5 convicts, 1 escape, 1 ventriloquist, 1 mentally ill jug band, at least a dozen broken hearts, too many po' folks with the blues, and 1 $10,000 reward offered to a chicken."

Kentucky Mountain Music: "Now folks, we're gonna play some good dance music. If it ain't right, get right. Get ready now let's go! Hot dog!" HOW has that not been sampled by some aspiring techno DJ? Aaaanyway, this is seven CDs worth of fiddlin' string bands from Kentucky. Yes there are some gospel and ballads thrown in but mostly this is all about the fiddlin' hoedowns and the banjo tunes. This is the music of good-time feel good dances. If your favorite songs on the Anthology of American Folk Music are "Indian War Whoop" or "The Wild Wagoner" definitely check this out. Rock music existed in the 1920s and here's your proof. These mountain folks would party at the hoedowns with sweaty rural hedonistic abandon and it fucking rules.

People Take Warning: AWESOME! Yes it is horribly exploitative how the artists cashed in on tragedy, but man alive does it have some amazing songs on it. Of course y'all know "When That Great Ship Went Down" and "Kassie Jones" from the Anthology, but there is so much more. All this sad string accompaniment and lyrics like "Oh how sad to know they never can come back" and "But we can't replace those brave souls who lost their lives that day." Very exploitative, but also very fascinating. For a great article about these "event songs" (as they called them) I highly suggest you read this article from 1929. That whole book is amazing, btw. And am I a horrible evil person if I find "Ohio Prison Fire" one of the most hilarious songs ever recorded? "Oh Jimmy! JIMMY!!! It's MOTHER!!"

And I also echo everyone here re: the brilliance of Bascom Lamar Lunsford. Supposedly there're plans to release a ten-CD boxed set of every single one of his Library of Congress recordings called The Memory Collection, but Folkways is a bit hesitant due to an apparent lack of interest. I'd buy one!

After spending many years with this, I really don't find it to be an especially good compilation. There are a fair number of great songs, but there's so much material I find unmemorable. Plenty of better material in all of the genres presented. Cool packaging, cool concept, great mythology around it, but when there are so many old recordings in these genres available I rarely feel that much need to listen to it.

i kind of agree with that. to be honest in terms of anthologies of folk music i find myself listening to art rosenbaum's "art of of field recording" collection more than anything else. it's not a colelction of historic recordings or anything (most were done in the past 30 years iirc) but i find it more engaging that a lot of stuff on harry smith's collection.

that said, it's a pretty meaningful and special anthology for many reasons, some of which you already mentioned.

Yeah it's almost more like a work of conceptual art or a piece of (extremely) revisionist musicology, like a deliberate attempt to create a mythical past. I feel like I've spent a long time trying to force myself to like all the music on the anthology when like 60-70% of it does nothing for me.

it was also the only example of that type of music that was known enough to be available/at the library -- there may be "better" compilations out there, or albums, or spotify or whatever, but part of its appeal for me is that everyone knows it because it was the only thing they had a chance to hear. so there's the element, for me, of it genuinely being popular folk music known to multiple generations of people. that appeals to my sense of togetherness and humanity almost as much as the music itself appeals to me. there are other people who know that version of "the house carpenter", and that mere fact makes the anthology valuable to me.

not saying it should matter to anyone else for whatever reason, but that's one reason it matters to me.

xp This is seriously a case of 2013 goggles, guys. Maybe it's hard to imagine a time when you couldn't literally spend years only listening to Awesome Tapes from Africa, or whatever, but this box was / is a revelation. It's beyond reproach.

That said, interesting that this topic came up today, because last night I watched the Harry Smith documentary that's tagged on as a 'bonus' feature of that dreadful LA concert DVD with Elvis Costello, Steve Earle, Lou Reed, etc, and WOOF - awful. The worst sort of talking-head style documentary combined with clips from that abysmal concert. Cut from Allen Ginsberg or Greil Marcus talking about how 'magical' the music of the anthology is to Petra fucking Hayden or Beth Orton or Gavin Friday performing some shitty version of one of the songs. Talk about cognitive dissonance. Also, no mention of Fahey (not to even mention his Grammy-winning liner notes), one small mention of Lomax, and a serious dearth of archival footage. What a waste of time.